27 December 2015

Corporate objectives are the reference point for the assessment of most business risks. In addition, a company’s budget may be considered as a stochastic variable influenced by a variety of risk factors following different distribution functions. Thus, we should not limit corporate budgets to the expected value but should also consider the probability and volume of possible deviations as chances and risks.

Looking at the interfaces between risk assessment, risk management and corporate budgeting, the special issue will focus attention on the following questions:

What are the potentials for an intensified integration of risk management and corporate budgeting?

How can a company integrate assessing and managing risks and corporate budgeting?

Which problems arise from an intensified integration and how are they dealt with?

What are possible effects of business risks on corporate performance measurement and management?

This special issue welcomes submissions in form of conceptual, case-based or empirical papers offering new insights into, but not limited to, the following:

Variance analysis as an approach for the integration of risk assessment and corporate budgeting

The dominance of the digital world in people’s lives today calls for a more thorough analysis of marketing in the electronic landscape. Today, a large part of business is done through digital channels of communication and delivery, and firms face many challenges in staying competitive in a new digital world that is dominated by electronic commerce and social media.

We are seeking contributions to this special issue that address these challenges and/or analyse the ways in which the digital environment is shaping tomorrow’s market.

We welcome articles based on quantitative or qualitative empirical studies or conceptual papers, and envisage that this special issue will embrace a full range of methodological approaches.

The International Journal of Network Science publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed research contributions on the emerging science of networks and its ever-increasing applications. IJNS examines both theoretical and applied aspects of network science, covering (but not limited to) biological, ecological, neural, communication, social and economic, cognitive and semantic, technological, and computer networks, as well as various research approaches/paradigms of network science. IJNS welcomes submissions dealing with important practical problems such as the interpretation and prediction of reliability, security, survivability, stability and phase transitions of complex networks.

Cartoon characters are often used to market so-called junk food to children. However, new research from Italy suggests that the same technique might be used to nudge preschoolers into eating more fresh fruit and vegetables too. Details of the investigation appear in the International Journal of Markets and Business Systems.

Fabrizio Baldassarre and Raffaele Campo of the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, explain how investigated how young children perceived different food items – savoury and sweet snacks and fresh fruit – based on whether or not the food had a sticker showing their favourite cartoon characters. The study showed that even children averse to choosing the healthy option could be persuaded to eat the fruit if it was associated with said cartoon character.

“Marketing to children is strongly related to psychology and marketers are often counselled by psychologists in order to better understand children’s desires and dreams but also the modality for presenting the products,” the team reports. Of course, marketing of what is commonly regarded as the less healthy option, crisps, sweets and other high-calorie and problematic snacks are often the subject of such work rather than companies finding ways to market healthy food. Given the persuasive power of young children in the supermarket aisles when shopping with parents and carers, there is certainly an opportunity to instill healthy eating habits early on and perhaps even to persuade the adults to make healthier choices about food along the way.

The team’s experiment demonstrated that the presence of a favourite character sticker on a kiwi fruit, for instance, influenced the childrens’ perception of how tasty that fruit was as a snack even before they had eaten the fruit. The team found that children who habitually rejected fruit as a snack option were persuaded to opt for fruit given the presence of a character sticker. They would even ignore well-known branded sweet and savoury snacks in favour of fruit with a cartoon sticker.

“Children were so enchanted by the presence of the characters that they tended to link the aesthetic appearance with the good taste of those selected foods, without trying them; the relationship with characters is strong enough to influence their preferences,” the team reports.

Bacteria and bees
Algorithms that mimic the behavior of living things are an important route into optimizing data mining and countless other applications. For instance, there are algorithms that emulate the way in which the workers from a hive of bees will seek out flowers with abundant nectar supplies. Similarly, another approach to algorithms copies the cultured foraging behavior of bacteria. Now, an international team based in Iran and the USA have combined the behavior of bees and bacteria in a novel multi-objective algorithm. Their approach pools the benefits of the artificial bee colony and bacterial foraging models in a single algorithm that is very flexible has fewer setting parameters and yet outperforms three of the most well-known multi-objective tools.

Mahmoodabadi, M.J., Taherkhorsandi, M., Maafi, R.A. and Castillo-Villar, K.K. (2015) ‘A novel multi-objective optimisation algorithm: artificial bee colony in conjunction with bacterial foraging’, Int. J. Intelligent Engineering Informatics, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.369–386.(I can’t get no) satisfaction
Customers satisfaction, trust and brand image are important factors in business and marketing, not least in the world of telecommunications with its multitude of suppliers of both services and devices such as smart phones. In rapidly developing nations there are major implications for business and marketing to better understand the behavior of customers and potential clients in this sector. New work from Ghana suggests that fundamentally, the same rules apply there as they do in the more established technological markets of “the West”, namely that “marketing managers need to develop marketing and loyalty strategies that result in better customer satisfaction, induce more trust in the brand and project the image of the brand high to build a stable customer base.”

Yeboah-Asiamah, E., Nimako, S.G., Quaye, D.M. and Buame, S. (2016) ‘Implicit and explicit loyalty: the role of satisfaction, trust and brand image in mobile telecommunication industry’, Int. J. Business and Emerging Markets, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp.94–115Yeast affection
Protein complexes abound across all life on Earth. A new US computational study of how such complex are interconnected suggests that in humans and yeast alike these interconnections of protein complexes are evolutionarily conserved. The discovery that for a given inter-complex hub in one species, human or yeast, there exists an equivalent hub in the other. This has important implications for understanding the protein networks and their implications for medicine, biotechnology and other areas. There are also implications for understanding the transfer of information between species a critical phenomenon in the emergence of new diseases and in the development of drug resistance in old ones.

Guerra, C. (2015) ‘On the interconnection of stable protein complexes: inter-complex hubs and their conservation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Homo sapiens networks’, Int. J. Bioinformatics Research and Applications, Vol. 11, No. 6, pp.483–502.Teatime for HIV
Natural chemicals, such as gallic Acid (GA) a polyphenol, found in tea leaves, gallnuts, oak bark and other plant parts could lead to new anti-HIV drugs that block the viral protease enzymes as effectively as current drugs including darunavir and amprenavir, according to research from India. HIV-1 Protease enzymes are critical to the assembly and maturation of infectious HIV retroviruses and so blocking their activity with drugs is the focus of much research and development to treat the virus that causes AIDS. The current work builds on earlier studies that have shown how derivatives of gallic acid are active against these enzymes and used computer modeling to design better analogs that could one day be used in a potent antiviral medication against HIV. The current lead compound in the work has the chemical name [(3S)-octahydrobenzofuran- 3-yl ((2S, 3R)-3-hydroxy-1-phenyl-4-(3,4,5-trihydroxy-N-isobutylphenylsulfonamido) butan-2-yl)carbamate]. It will most likely have a much shorter name should it or its chemical cousins be marketed as drugs.

The International Journal of Higher Education and Sustainability proposes and fosters discussion on the evolution of higher education for sustainability, with emphasis on the three interconnected pillars, the environmental, the economic and the social, along with emerging dimensions of culture and politics. The incorporation of sustainability in higher education is critical in producing human resources, in terms of the essential skills, understanding and knowledge, in the 21st century. IJHES also considers the likely and actual implications for the workplace.

Those of us who are not dentally deprived endeavor to clean our teeth at least twice a day and to floss regularly. Looking after one’s teeth and brushing effectively are instilled in us from childhood along with the idea of eating plenty of fruit and vegetables and avoiding too many sweet things, especially between meals. It seems that brushing habits, as with many other habits, become ingrained and motor memory takes over in this twice-daily ritual. We undertake our dental hygiene on auto-pilot, whether or not our regime is as effective as our dental hygienist would like.

Now, Japanese researchers have discovered that how effectively we clean our teeth and how satisfied we are with the brushing job we do depends a lot on the sound of the bristles scrubbing against the enamel. In trials with volunteer teeth cleaners, the team used a tiny microphone in the toothbrush to “sample” the sound being made in the mouth during brushing and to modulate it in some way and then feed that sound back to the volunteer.

Writing in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, Taku Hachisu and Hiroyuki Kajimoto of The University of Electro-Communications, in Chofu, Japan explain how modulating the brush sound affects brushing efficacy and satisfaction. The team found that if they manipulated the pitch, or frequency and loudness, of the brushing sound they could alter the volunteers’ perception of comfort and accomplishment. They also showed that if they gradually increased the frequency as teeth cleaning progressed, the volunteers felt like the process was more comfortable and that their teeth were cleaner at the end of the process.

“Tooth brushing provides a ‘negative reward’ for users as they brush their teeth to avoid developing caries,” the team explains. Many people find the task boring. “Subsequently, users do not consider the impact of omitting the action until suffering from caries or other dental diseases,” the team adds. Their results show that it is possible to motivate users by interactively manipulating the frequency of brushing sounds, so that the task becomes more satisfying. Importantly, the system can tell, through a built-in force sensor, whether a person is brushing too hard, which can damage the gum line, and so give them aural feedback to encourage them to clean their teeth more gently.

The prototype system requires the teeth cleaner to wear headphones, which is impractical in real life. However, there are bone conduction speaker systems that might be incorporated into the smart toothbrush so that the amplified feedback loop is created in one’s mouth. The team will next recruit volunteers to test the system in their comfort of their own bathrooms.